The AWS Storage Gateway, Amazon said, connects an on-premise software appliance with cloud-based storage for integration between on-premise environments and AWS cloud storage infrastructure. According to Amazon, data is maintained in on-premise storage hardware while asynchronously uploaded to AWS for swift performance and minimal latency. Once in the cloud, data is encrypted and stored in Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3).

The AWS Storage Gateway removes the need to re-architect existing applications to take advantage of the cloud, according to Amazon.

"With the AWS Storage Gateway, we're providing businesses yet another way to easily take advantage of AWS' secure, scalable and cost-effective cloud storage for use with their on-premises applications," said Alyssa Henry, general manager of AWS Storage Services, in a statement. "The AWS Storage Gateway works with your existing applications using a standard iSCSI interface, securely transfers your data to AWS over SSL, and stores data encrypted at rest in Amazon S3."

The AWS Storage Gateway also helps users leverage Amazon EC2 for additional capacity during peak times, for new projects and to run workloads, according to the company. Users can mirror on-premise data to EC2 instances by using the AWS Storage Gateway to upload the data to Amazon S3 in the form of Amazon Elastic Block Store snapshots. EBS volumes can be created from these snapshots and attached to EC2 instances; from there, the instances will have access to the data to perform processing and computation.

Cloud providers will leverage the AWS Storage Gateway as a disaster recovery and backup option within their cloud services, Amazon said. Case in point: Datapipe, which offers IT management and security services, will offer new backup services leveraging AWS Storage Gateway.

"We develop and implement solutions for our clients to reliably store and back up their critical application data. Many of our clients store user-generated content locally," said Ed Laczynski, vice president of cloud strategy at Datapipe, in a statement. "Traditional off-site backup products are often costly to maintain and not geared toward automation for recovery. A cost-effective and reliable alternative, AWS Storage Gateway addresses these issues by plugging seamlessly into the environments we manage for our customers, providing low-latency data access, while encrypting and snapshotting data to AWS' cloud storage infrastructure."

The AWS Storage Gateway costs $125 per month, per installed gateway and comes with a 60-day free trial, according to Amazon. Snapshot storage pricing starts at 14 cents per GB, per month. Each gateway can support up to 12 volumes and a total of 12 TB of storage.

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